Jeanette Okwu – AI in Marketing: How Technology is Transforming the Creator Landscape

NOTES

Jeanette Okwu on LinkedIn

BEYONDInfluence

Influence by Design Podcast

Book Recommendation: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

SUMMARY

In this episode of the Maker-Manager Money Podcast, Kyle Knowles had the pleasure of reconnecting with Jeanette Oku, a marketing pioneer and influencer marketing expert, who joined me from Berlin. Our conversation delved into her journey from journalism to establishing a global agency, as well as her insights into the evolving landscape of the creator economy.

We kicked off the episode by discussing Jeanette’s recent experiences at various marketing conferences in Paris and Dresden. She highlighted a particularly impactful influencer marketing conference in Paris, which focused on the intersection of creators and marketers. Jeanette shared her excitement about the event and the valuable connections she made, including a reunion with a friend from California.

As we transitioned into the core of our discussion, I revisited a topic we touched on in our previous conversation: the shift from the term “influencer” to “content creator.” Jeanette elaborated on her predictions for influencer marketing in 2025, noting that the market is becoming increasingly saturated, which may lead to a decrease in influencer fees. She emphasized the need for influencer marketing to be recognized as a legitimate discipline within marketing strategies, rather than just an add-on.

Authenticity emerged as a key theme in our conversation. Jeanette argued that genuine content is more important than ever, especially in a world flooded with polished marketing materials. She pointed out that audiences are drawn to real, relatable content, and that brands must allow influencers the freedom to express their authentic voices.

We also explored the potential for older generations, such as Gen X and baby boomers, to thrive as influencers. Jeanette shared a fascinating anecdote about a campaign she worked on featuring retirees on TikTok, demonstrating that there is indeed a market for diverse age groups in the influencer space.

As the conversation progressed, we shifted our focus to the role of artificial intelligence in marketing. Jeanette explained how AI tools can streamline content creation and enhance marketing strategies, but she cautioned against relying on AI without a clear understanding of the problems one aims to solve. We discussed the importance of using AI to complement human creativity rather than replace it.

Towards the end of our chat, we touched on Jeanette’s personal life, including her beloved cat and her daughter’s transition to university. We also discussed her artistic pursuits, such as knitting, and the balance between work and personal creativity.

Finally, I asked Jeanette for book recommendations, and while she admitted she hadn’t read much recently, she suggested the classic “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov, emphasizing its timeless relevance.

This episode is packed with insights for aspiring entrepreneurs and marketers, offering a fresh perspective on the future of influencer marketing, the importance of authenticity, and the transformative potential of AI in the creative space. Join us for an engaging and thought-provoking discussion that will inspire you to navigate the ever-evolving world of entrepreneurship and marketing.

Connect with Kyle Knowles on LinkedIn Connect with Jeanette Oku on LinkedIn Jeanette’s company BeyondInfluence

Kyle Knowles: Hello there, welcome to the Maker-Manager Money Podcast, a podcast to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles and last year in London, England, I sat down with Jeanette Oku to explore her journey from journalist to marketing pioneer, driving into the fundamentals of influencer marketing and her experience building a global agency. It’s a year later and I’m catching up with Jeanette who called in from Germany to discuss the evolving creator economy, her insights from recent marketing conferences, and the shift from influencers to content creators. We explore her predictions for influencer marketing in 2025, including changes in creator fees and the growing importance of authenticity. Jeanette also shares how AI is transforming marketing while reflecting on her personal creative pursuits and the importance of finding balance in entrepreneurship. Jeanette, where are you calling in from today?

Jeanette Okwu: I am calling from Berlin, which is where I am currently.

Kyle Knowles: Very nice. I know the past couple of weeks you’ve been to Paris and Dresden and other conferences.

Jeanette Okwu: So tell me about… Are you stalking me on LinkedIn?

Kyle Knowles: I’m stalking you on LinkedIn. What was going on in Paris and these different conferences you’ve been attending recently?

Jeanette Okwu: Yeah, so Paris was actually was I think for this year was my highlight conference, because it’s it’s an it was an influencer marketing conference, where everything just was about influencer marketing. And I think there’s another one in In the UK, similar, also focus influencer marketing attached to an affiliate marketing conference from Hello Partner. But this one was, had a European focus. It was really interesting. It was for creators and also for marketers or technology providers. And it was really, really good. I had so much fun and it was Paris and I met a friend who moved there from California. And we had a fantastic night, so it was all in all really great. Anytime I find a reason to go to Paris, I will do it.

Kyle Knowles: I agree with you. It’s a beautiful city. I wanted to ask you, I remember last time we talked in London a year ago, a little over a year ago, you talked about this idea of brand ambassadors and influencers and how the shift is moving from the term influencer to content creator. And I know podcasts, for example, Spotify used to have an app called Spotify for Podcasters, and now it’s called Spotify for Creators, and they’re allowing videos to be added to podcasts and all kinds of cool things like that. So what I wanted to ask you, or what are your predictions for 2025 when it comes to influencer marketing and content creators?

Jeanette Okwu: Yeah, so the term creator, I think has cemented this year, that doesn’t only mean that these are influencers, right? So anybody who creates something, it could be graphic artists, et cetera, they can also call themselves content creators. And that seeps into this new term, the creator economy, where, you know, everything that is being produced in a creative way, it goes into that. But for influencers in particular, We’re just, you know, since it’s end of 2024, we’re going into the predictions and trends for next year. I think for influencer marketing, it was a year with up and downs, always attached to economic up and downs. So we could see some marketing budgets being slashed, especially in the influencer marketing space. because it’s still viewed as an add-on and not as a discipline that should have a seat on the table when campaigns are being conceived. And for next year, we see some clear signs of that. The influencer fees, which especially in Germany are really, really high, are going to go down because the market is very saturated. There are many, many, many more people wanting to, you know, make a living or at least get a slice of the pie in influencer marketing budget wise, they want to make some money. So the choices are bigger. So I think the pricing, the pricing war will adjust a little bit and go down at the same time. Since the the discipline gets more professionalized, also from a marketing or agency perspective, the demands of what marketers are going to ask from these influencers will also be more complex, not just the post or something like that. It’s more intertwined.

Kyle Knowles: And through that professionalization of influencer marketing, I know the authenticity of influencer marketing, you know, shooting, shooting a video shotgun on the run while you’re walking, whatever, and not having high production value, like some slick marketing piece, is that is that going to change? Or is there still going to be room for that?

Jeanette Okwu: Yeah, I think authenticity is is more important than ever because of the massive content that we are exposed to. If you’re not true to yourself, why should anybody watch you? Now, the on-the-run thing, I think that’s just one aspect. There’s other content that can be very authentic that is highly produced. But I concur with you that stylized impersonal content that looks scripted and looks like it’s coming from a brand won’t fly. People buy from people and it needs to sound as if this comes from the person because they obviously follow somebody because of the content that they create. And that’s the authentic content. And if all of a sudden there’s a partnership with a brand going on and it sounds completely different because the brand is so uptight that they want to dictate everything, then it’s not going to resonate. And the performance of those posts or the revenue or conversions that they want to get, they won’t get it at all.

Kyle Knowles: I’ve heard, and maybe these kind of videos are coming up in my feed for people trying to sell me their services, but I’ve heard that there is room for, say, Gen X influencers, older folks, because, you know, TikTok and other places are dominated by kind of a younger generation, maybe millennial or Gen Z. Have you found that to be true, that there is sort of a room for Gen Xers to become influencers?

Jeanette Okwu: Oh, I think you’d be surprised how many Gen Xers, even boomers actually there is. It’s very funny. A couple of years ago, I did a campaign. It was for Amber Alert and it was about online grooming and Amber Alert did a European-wide campaign and it was. basically in the style of BTS dance, you know, those trending dances was a TikTok campaign. And we worked for the German market with a group of influencers, and they were all retirees, they were all way over 70. And that’s on TikTok. So also there, a lot of people are older now. So even boomers have a chance because it’s, you know, this is a group of people who have disposable income. So if you can sell your product to an older generation, you know, you should not leave that out and not always have the young people be presented. I mean, that’s the problem for me personally. If I see ads somewhere, cosmetics or fragrances, et cetera, especially now around Christmas time, their kids, or, you know, skincare, creams against wrinkles. And they these kids, these people, they show me our kids, they don’t have any wrinkles, I have wrinkled, right? I want to see how the thing works. And please don’t brush it or use filters on it. I think that’s more effective than anything. So I think it’s got what’s the brand? I hope I’m not making a mistake. It’s, it’s a L’Oreal could be But maybe I’m mistaken. So they have these big celebrities around the corner in the in the drugstore. And I think they’re global. So they’re everywhere in the world. And they have Helen Mirren, they have I remember Helen Mirren, because they have her on the ad, which I love older woman, but then they have airbrushed her or photoshopped her so much that there’s not a single wrinkle on that woman. And I know that not to be true, because we see her also in videos online, and woman has wrinkles, which is natural, right? So yeah, I guess I’m getting completely off topic.

Kyle Knowles: No, it’s completely on topic. Yeah, we’re just talking about producing either this high quality, glitzy, photoshopped, kind of very slick and you immediately kind of, it’s kind of like the banner blindness of the 90s and 2000s when you wouldn’t really look at ads because every website had kind of that banner going and you wouldn’t really pay attention to it. But a lot of times we can immediately tell if someone is trying to sell us something, right? And so I think that’s where UGC and influencers kind of have the upper hand because they can make it so quickly and less slick and it seems more authentic and things like that. Thanks for your answers for that. So if there are any Gen Xers or baby boomers out there that want to get into influencer marketing, what would your advice be to them?

Jeanette Okwu: Pick your niche. And quite honestly, I would say the same thing to the young people. You shouldn’t do it because you want to make money. it’s, that’s not gonna work. Because how do you want to, you should do this because you have interesting things to say or show. And then the other thing will happen or not. You need to have knowledge about how the platforms work, et cetera. But if you want to do this to, from the get go say, okay, I wanna make money. Oh gosh, that’s hard because you need to build your community. And that is hard, hard work. I’m actually glad I’m not an influencer. Because the struggle is real.

Kyle Knowles: Yeah, that’s a lot of time and effort with no immediate reward, no immediate paycheck and building an audience. And so you’re putting a bunch of videos out there, hoping that maybe someday you can build an audience, but you just never know if it’ll pick up or not. I was going to ask you about your cat.

Jeanette Okwu: Oh, my cat.

Kyle Knowles: Your cat, your stress ball. You talked about having your cat. Yes. You don’t have a stress ball. You have a cat and how is your stress cat.

Jeanette Okwu: Cat is great. He is He’s the fluffiest thing. And he’s, I think he thinks he’s a dog because he catches balls, et cetera. He also, I think over the last month, he is much more talkative. So he speaks to you. He argues with you. You can, you know, stand in front of him, look at him and say something to him. And he talks back. Amazing. So I think that Our daughter talked us into getting a cat. I think that was the best thing. And my husband, who was completely against it in the beginning, I don’t like the cat. I don’t like the cat. I hate the cat. Hey, buddy, what do you need? And in the evenings, they sit side by side and we all watch TV. It’s just really cool.

Kyle Knowles: Okay, so your husband’s best friend is a cat, not a dog then?

Jeanette Okwu: Yes.

Kyle Knowles: Very nice. And speaking of your daughter, how is your daughter? Did she start university?

Jeanette Okwu: Yes, she started university in September. She was very anxious. She did not know if London was the wise decision because it’s such a big town. And she was thinking maybe Maybe I’m robbing myself of a university experience, a true university experience by not going to a university town because she also was pre-accepted at Birmingham, which I thought would have been probably really great. But whenever we talk now, she said she’s so happy. And she did have, She did struggle in her last two years when she went to Oxford to finish her high school, basically. So she was in boarding school. And because of the people she met there, and it wasn’t her type of people, a hundred percent, some yes. And I said to her, you know, a university will be different because there will be people from all kinds of different walks of life and you can choose who you want to hang out with or who you want to become friends with.

Kyle Knowles: I’m glad to hear it all worked out very, very well. But I remember she was preparing for exams and everything last year and taking exams and getting ready to apply to university. So I’m glad it all worked out. On your LinkedIn profile, it says that you do influencer and AI marketing. Let’s talk about AI marketing for a bit. What does that mean, AI marketing?

Jeanette Okwu: Well, it’s basically utilizing AI for anything that you do. It also plays a big role in influencer marketing because there are a lot of tools that allow the marketer, but also the creator to streamline their content creation or their campaigns, campaign flow, anything that you can imagine. You do research, you do trending. So AI plays a role in it. And then if you do your own marketing, you can use also all kinds of tools down to podcast recording and editing, right?

Kyle Knowles: Exactly, exactly. As a fellow podcaster, you understand these tools. What are some of the tools that you use most often for as far as AI goes when doing marketing?

Jeanette Okwu: Well, you’d have obviously the usual suspects, Chet, GPT, Claude. I’ve used, I’ve tested them all. And for a while, Claude was my favorite just because linguistically it was very sophisticated. But I think chat GPT has improved a lot. So I use, you know, when I do my, my podcast, the summaries, et cetera, and then I want to write the summaries in my tone of voice. The one that Riverside, for example, proposes to you does it’s not my tone of voice, so I need to change it. and then deriving messages from it, et cetera. But also, I have to say, business-wise, what makes sense? A lot of companies getting all these tools, but they’re not really using them in the correct way. So that’s a waste of money. You need to, from the get-go, not saying, OK, I’m doing AI in my sales strategy, or in my marketing strategy, or my email marketing, et cetera. when the actual question should be, what’s the problem I want to solve? Why am I doing it? And it should always gear toward your customer. So are there problems, issues that I need to solve? And if so, how can AI help you do this faster, better, and more efficient?

Kyle Knowles: Yeah, it makes sense. I totally agree. It’s almost all the way back to the early days of computing and that’s garbage in, garbage out. And I feel a lot of people don’t understand that. It’s still about the data and the data is the questions that you ask and the strategies that you have before you even approach AI to help you. And I think people lean on AI to come up with strategies and come up with questions and rely on it too heavily and can get bad results because of that.

Jeanette Okwu: I mean, we had this fear mongering going on. Oh, we’re all going to lose our jobs, right? Writers or anybody who’s creative. I think that people have realized that that’s not the case. It helps you being more efficient. But. Well, let me let me go back a little bit. I think for people who are not good writers, they are now better writers. But for good writers, it’s not going to change. It helps them get more efficient and faster. So we see it leveling out. The people who are not as talented, they’re improving. but the ones who are outstanding anyway, it helps them only being more efficient.

Kyle Knowles: You’re right, people who couldn’t write very well, and apparently Eric Schmidt from Google uses it. He’ll draft something up and then put it in an AI to make it sound more professional. And last year, we were about a year into ChatGPT being rolled out to the mainstream world. Now we’re two years into that because ChatGPT to the mainstream world’s two-year birthday was November 30th. Over the past year, what has surprised you the most about the advancements in AI?

Jeanette Okwu: I think for me, because of the assumption of what AI can do, nothing really surprises me when there are new releases of things, really. What I think was rather surprising, how limited it still can be, for example, in terms of image creation. I think this stuff, oftentimes you can spot it if it’s created with AI. So that to me is surprising in the negative way, I think. I do, and I’m dabbling myself in this topic, is about how do you create your own avatar? For example, for podcasts. Right. And I’ve tinkered a little bit with HN because it’s integrated in Canva. And what I did was I took a picture, just a photo. I uploaded it and then put some words, wrote some words, uploaded my voice. And then I wrote a little text. and I stirred the pot and boiled it and out came a video of me talking, basically saying what I wrote down in my voice. And the video derived from a photo, that to me was amazing. It just, it looked like me and it looked like a video, although it was a photo before. There’s a tool that I’m using, and it’s made by this group of writers. And that’s phenomenal. It’s called Lex. It’s really cool. Yes. And they basically, you have an idea, you write a little outline, and then you can ask it if there’s anything missing, or if they suggest additional stuff, then they help you drafting the outline. And then when you write it, or they help you also write it, they finish you to write it. It’s all from a writer’s perspective. And so it’s cohesive. If it’s an article or a book or anything or white paper, so it’s really good.

Kyle Knowles: One last thing I want to talk about is have you had a Twix since I last saw you a year ago?

Jeanette Okwu: No, actually not. I think I rarely had any sweet. I know, I remember we talked about that.

Kyle Knowles: You’ve been very good. You’ve been very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as far as artistic pursuits, I know you have a love of language and literature, and that’s what you majored in, and you went into journalism and things like that. Are you doing any artistic personal pursuits?

Jeanette Okwu: I’m knitting. Although with the move and work, et cetera. I don’t get to do it often because it takes up time. But I chose to make this sweater, which I think was, it’s just so beautiful. Even my mother has, oh yeah, that’s beautiful, but it’s so complicated because you have to count and stay focused. But this one is the first one where it’s like, you know, you knit it in one piece from the top, it’s called raglam. And then with like We have to count it and then different colors. It’s this one is complicated.

Kyle Knowles: It feeds your artists side.

Jeanette Okwu: I guess for now, um, I used to, I used to draw, I used to, so I had my own fashion line that was good, but I’m not doing it. I think it’s about really the time to put in the time. And I think I’m very, I’ve a lot of things in my head work words that I have to do, and then the family and, and all of that, I think I push that back, because it’s not as important, I think, although it probably should be more important, because it helps to get your juices flowing. That’s the other thing, right?

Kyle Knowles: For sure. And last question I have for you, Jeanette is, do you have any book recommendations over the past year? Has there been any books or podcasts that you would recommend to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Jeanette Okwu: Oh, actually no, because I have not gotten around to really dig into books and podcasts also less because I’m Again, my work commute is very short. And on this commute, using public transportation, I’ll read emails and answer emails. But I would still always recommend my favorite book, which is Master Margarita by Paul Gagos. If I cannot recommend anything new, then I would recommend something older. which I think is still really relevant today.

Kyle Knowles: I’ve downloaded it to Audible and I’m committed to reading it before we speak again, for sure. So I love that answer simply because I think a lot of people spend so much time with inputs and thinking they need more and more inputs. They need to keep learning and learning and reading and listening to podcasts. But my focus for 2025 and for the past couple of months has been output. ideas, the things that I want to do. I’ve had plenty of inputs in my 56 years on the earth and it’s time to focus on inputs.

Jeanette Okwu: Yeah, definitely.

Kyle Knowles: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast, Jeanette. I really appreciate you taking some time to me.

Jeanette Okwu: Thank you, Kyle. Always a pleasure.